Thursday, March 06, 2014

Can We Talk About Warmgasms?

Someone wrote to me complaining about what he called Kevin Trenberth's "warmgasm" -- his purported delight in the possible appearance of an El Niño later this year, and with it still warmer global temperatures.

That's reading an awful lot into a half sentence of his: "Trenberth said this El Nino may even push the globe out of a decade-long slowdown in temperature increase, 'so suddenly global warming kicks into a whole new level.'"

To me it sounds like more of a warning.

However...I can understand myself, how an El Niño and its higher surface temperatures will be...interesting...from a scientific perspective.

Climate scientists spend their entire lives trying to understand the climate system, working very hard to do the very best science they can do, for which now they mostly get a lot of shit and abuse from deniers, politicians, ideologues, etc. -- the likes of Marc Morano, Mark Steyn, James "Jimmy" Inhofe, Anthony Watts Horsepowers, and all the anti-scientific bloggerdicks out there.

So there can certainly be a certain scientific satisfaction in seeing the predictions and expections of AGW being verified (yet again!). Especially if it turns the conversation from the unscientific focus on the "pause" and puts your enemies on the defensive. That's just human nature.

Not that their position will change. Data never changes their minds. They crowed over the decline in sea level in 2010, when scientists said it was just temporary and sea level rise would resume. When it did, did you see any of them admit they were wrong, let alone analyze why they were wrong?

No, I didn't either.

There will never be an end to climate denial, ever. It will go on for decades, with ever more clever, distorted, and misleading reasons advanced by the climate clowns for why AGW is false, despite the immense amount of science already behind it, despite ever higher temperatures.

The world is going to warm, just like it has been for decades now. Physics says it has to. An El Niño will (again) show that. That's bad for the planet, but, in its way, good for science.

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P.S. I am sure this post will be miscontrued and improperly cited by the evildoers among us. But then, don't they always?

PPS: I am still curious to know of any contarian who would have, in 1975, predicted/expected 0.6-0.7 C of warming by 2014. And why.